Taking the framework of the Aarhus Rapport 1961-1969 as a springboard to examine the modernist avantgarde, the Museum of Ordure's contribution to the exhibition Systemics #4. Aarhus Rapport 1969 - 2017: Avantgarde as Network (or, the Politics of Provincialism) is a series of films chosen from its collection of World Cinema which is expanded in time and narrative. The Collection emphasises shared content rather than authorship or nationality.

The Aarhus Rapport was designed as an event which implies a transitional condition. Did it have a beginning and an end for example, or did it happen as a disclosure of converging interests without a conclusion? Was the event autonomous, did it have a political identity? Was there a grand design or did it appear as a set of independent speculations and in the process 'naturalised' itself?

Provincialism is generally understood as a state of mind which is narrow in scope and is often seen in contrast to the universalism of the avant-garde. Political principle which applies to provincialism is localism which stands in opposition to great schemes and opposes centralisation. Does this contradict the revolutionary universalism of the avant-garde?

These opposing philosophical and political questions have occupied generations and continue to do so which lie at the core of the debates surrounding the modernist avant-garde which see a community, group or nation as an 'imagined community' (Benedict Anderson). Imagined communities can be interpreted as a social construction, as in Edward Said's 'imagined geographies'. Drawing from films through time and narrative the Museum of Ordure is setting in motion these questions via the twin natural impulses of subject and content.

All films are held in our distributed collection across peer to peer networks (the commons). In this way the Museum is also promoting commonism by questioning ownership, copyright and acts of piracy. The edges of legality and transgressing the framework of capitalism has urgency as never before.

The Museum is further posing the question of inertia - how is a human being to be lifted from an infused condition of helplessness prevailing our times. What kind of a ‘rhizomatic’ system (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari) is possible with common principles of action, justice and equality?

Here, the Museum of Ordure is proposing collectivity rather than individualism as a forward mechanism which enhances the inner life of a human being rather than oppressing it. Our bodies and consciousness have been subjugated since time immemorial, human beings have been dishonoured and wasted throughout time and history has been rendered incomprehensible.

Can a network of the willing act as agents of unforgetting towards a new reality?

Museum of Ordure is a self institution which explores the cultural value of ordure through its projects and ongoing public collections. It takes a special interest in the management of human waste and its impact on the concept of the public sphere and civil society.